Demonstrations of xfsdist, the Linux eBPF/bcc version.


xfsdist traces XFS reads, writes, opens, and fsyncs, and summarizes their
latency as a power-of-2 histogram. For example:

# ./xfsdist 
Tracing XFS operation latency... Hit Ctrl-C to end.
^C

operation = 'read'
     usecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 0        |                                        |
         2 -> 3          : 362      |                                        |
         4 -> 7          : 807      |*                                       |
         8 -> 15         : 20686    |****************************************|
        16 -> 31         : 512      |                                        |
        32 -> 63         : 4        |                                        |
        64 -> 127        : 2744     |*****                                   |
       128 -> 255        : 7127     |*************                           |
       256 -> 511        : 2483     |****                                    |
       512 -> 1023       : 1281     |**                                      |
      1024 -> 2047       : 39       |                                        |
      2048 -> 4095       : 5        |                                        |
      4096 -> 8191       : 1        |                                        |

operation = 'open'
     usecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 0        |                                        |
         2 -> 3          : 3        |****************************************|

This output shows a bi-modal distribution for read latency, with a faster
mode of 20,686 reads that took between 8 and 15 microseconds, and a slower
mode of over 10,000 reads that took between 64 and 1023 microseconds. It's
likely that the faster mode was a hit from the in-memory file system cache,
and the slower mode is a read from a storage device (disk).

This "latency" is measured from when the operation was issued from the VFS
interface to the file system, to when it completed. This spans everything:
block device I/O (disk I/O), file system CPU cycles, file system locks, run
queue latency, etc. This is a better measure of the latency suffered by
applications reading from the file system than measuring this down at the
block device interface.

Note that this only traces the common file system operations previously
listed: other file system operations (eg, inode operations including
getattr()) are not traced.


An optional interval and a count can be provided, as well as -m to show the
distributions in milliseconds. For example:

# ./xfsdist -m 1 5
Tracing XFS operation latency... Hit Ctrl-C to end.

10:14:15:

operation = 'read'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 1366     |****************************************|
         2 -> 3          : 86       |**                                      |
         4 -> 7          : 95       |**                                      |
         8 -> 15         : 132      |***                                     |
        16 -> 31         : 72       |**                                      |

operation = 'write'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 685      |****************************************|

10:14:16:

operation = 'read'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 984      |****************************************|
         2 -> 3          : 66       |**                                      |
         4 -> 7          : 67       |**                                      |
         8 -> 15         : 104      |****                                    |
        16 -> 31         : 70       |**                                      |
        32 -> 63         : 12       |                                        |

operation = 'write'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 536      |****************************************|

10:14:17:

operation = 'read'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 1262     |****************************************|
         2 -> 3          : 75       |**                                      |
         4 -> 7          : 80       |**                                      |
         8 -> 15         : 119      |***                                     |
        16 -> 31         : 75       |**                                      |
        32 -> 63         : 3        |                                        |

operation = 'write'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 639      |****************************************|

10:14:18:

operation = 'read'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 1070     |****************************************|
         2 -> 3          : 58       |**                                      |
         4 -> 7          : 74       |**                                      |
         8 -> 15         : 140      |*****                                   |
        16 -> 31         : 60       |**                                      |
        32 -> 63         : 5        |                                        |

operation = 'write'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 556      |****************************************|

10:14:19:

operation = 'read'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 1176     |****************************************|
         2 -> 3          : 53       |*                                       |
         4 -> 7          : 94       |***                                     |
         8 -> 15         : 112      |***                                     |
        16 -> 31         : 77       |**                                      |
        32 -> 63         : 3        |                                        |

operation = 'write'
     msecs               : count     distribution
         0 -> 1          : 613      |****************************************|

This shows a mixed read/write workload, where the slower read mode was around
10 ms.


USAGE message:

# ./xfsdist -h
usage: xfsdist [-h] [-T] [-m] [-p PID] [interval] [count]

Summarize XFS operation latency

positional arguments:
  interval            output interval, in seconds
  count               number of outputs

optional arguments:
  -h, --help          show this help message and exit
  -T, --notimestamp   don't include timestamp on interval output
  -m, --milliseconds  output in milliseconds
  -p PID, --pid PID   trace this PID only

examples:
    ./xfsdist            # show operation latency as a histogram
    ./xfsdist -p 181     # trace PID 181 only
    ./xfsdist 1 10       # print 1 second summaries, 10 times
    ./xfsdist -m 5       # 5s summaries, milliseconds